How To Choose A Right-sized Manufacturing System

Chapter 4 - Maintaining Perspective

If you complete the introspective steps along the path of choosing a right-sized manufacturing system, you will develop a better understanding of yourself as a manufacturer and the particular aspects of a manufacturing control system that will meet your needs.

Before you step off and start contacting software vendors about the capabilities of their products, we need to have one last heart-to-heart about what you are likely to encounter.

I remember, early in my career, starting the search for a new automobile. Newly married, we had no children at the time, and we hardly ever ventured more than 100 miles from home. Moreover, my salary as a junior designer of computer equipment put serious constraints on the kind of automobile we could afford.

As we visited one automobile showroom after another, salesmen eagerly displayed their wares, pointing our the benefits of a more powerful engine, the optional 6-speaker stereo radio, the model with more chrome, heated seats, and remotely controlled side mirrors. As an engineer, I listened and understood. I drank the Kool-aide. But soon I was thinking about purchasing an automobile twice as expensive as what I could afford.

In the end, none of these salespeople sold me a car. Instead I purchased a used car, with a more powerful engine that consumed a lot of gas, heated seats that worked mostly in the summer, and a remotely controlled passenger side mirror. Oh, and if you could receive any radio station on the car’s 6-speaker stereo radio, you could surely look out the window and see the station’s transmitter tower. Right-sized? Sadly, no.

Looking back, many years later, I realize this purchase decision was not one that I am proud of. But, as is so often the case, it was an instructive one. I can see that, even though I went to the market with a firm understanding of my needs and the features most important to me, I allowed well-meaning (OK, perhaps self-interested) salespeople to distract me. In the end, I failed to purchase a right-sized automobile.

Later in life, in the process of helping clients select a right-sized manufacturing system, I have observed the same conflict in action. The client starts the process with a carefully constructed list of the benefits he wants and the features he requires, only to be distracted by demonstrations of products with all sorts wiz-bang features, but way beyond his means and needs.

Today I urge clients to consider their objectives in the context of what you think they can reasonably achieve using their available resources. A 3-person assembly house shouldn’t be spending money on software that automates the Sales/Manufacturing relationship. Spending thousands to achieve a 10% reduction on inventory worth only $10,000 doesn’t make sense either. Expecting to implement new production and purchasing procedures without hiring additional staff is impractical, too.

Once you and your staff have compiled a list of manageable objectives, the next step is to determine whether any of the desired gains justify the cost of a manufacturing system.

Over the years, we’ve found that most justifications for the deployment of a system fall into one of three categories which we will examine starting in the next chapter of How To Choose A Right-sized Manufacturing System.